The Unknown Masterpiece

by John Brooke

  ‘The guy on the rock?’

  ‘Almost.’

  They had consumed a quantity of beer, laughing, playing the games of mutual attraction. The expensive lingerie had served its purpose and was now discarded. She wore only the department-store quilt with which Martin Bettelman had covered his second-hand bed. She had allowed this young Swiss to see her, even touch for a moment here and there, and she had enjoyed kissing those sensuous soup-lapping lips.

  But Rudi wasn’t an angelic ghost by a river. A docile Saint Bernard could never be.

  And, more cogent to the matter sorting through her foggy soul, he wasn’t Claude Néon, who was hairier, much larger, and so much more intense — all that sublimated power. Rudi was nowhere near to being a man like Claude. He was an overly intellectual Swiss art cop with milk-white, mole-spattered skin.

  It wasn’t that Aliette Nouvelle was a bigger-is-better kind of girl. It was because she could not shut down the machine in her mind comparing men.

  In seeking what, Inspector?

  She only knew the feeling was warm, but far from warm enough. Swathed in her blanket, she moved across the space of the chilly room and pressed herself against him. ‘Time to get some sleep, Agent… Big day tomorrow, you and me.’

  He turned, so willing.

  Inspector Nouvelle smiled the kind of smile all women have to master for moments exactly like this. ‘I mean you in your bed, me in mine.’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Yes. We will continue on tomorrow, Rudi. We will see where this investigation leads.’

  ‘But…’ prying at her blanket, just like a loyal Saint Bernard, nudging.

  ‘Please… Nothing like this is ever solved so directly. It can’t be, Rudi. Mm?’ Pulling gently away from his hands. ‘…Come on, get dressed.We’ll build on what we know tomorrow.’

  Of course he acquiesced. After a few more longing kisses, Rudi went, slightly groggy, down the long stairs, having been ordered to meet her at Freiestrasse at 08:00 hours. She waved from the landing and closed the door. She briefly wondered, Did he have a wife he was willing to lie to? A wife and beautiful Swiss child? It was not her problem. Her problem was her sense of responsibility. She cared about the thing she needed to break apart. Her own erstwhile masterpiece, now destined for love’s scrap heap. Her problem was her anger and the need to keep moving, though she had no idea where. Except to learn more about this crime.

  17

  Rudi’s Day in the Twilight Zone

  ‘Your eyes, Rudi. I’m going to need your eyes.’

  ‘Yes.’ But can a cop see his mistakes before they happen? Only vaguely.

  Last evening, whispering the details of her metamorphosis, she had articulated a compelling link between attention to method and the vocational sense of duty, arguing that these two were bottom-line prerequisites, how the one fed the other, creating true professional integrity and a compassionate love of mankind. No woman had ever told Rudi anything like that before. And so FedPol Agent Bucholtz awoke believing he was in love. In love with this French inspector who had smiled and patted his head and called him my beautiful puppy. The woman beside him, who sleepily scolded Rudi for smelling of beer even as she reached to keep him in bed, she was a good woman, a long-time lover — but this Aliette was something special. Rudi pleaded a long and difficult stake-out with a colleague — they’d deserved a beer or two. He left advising that it was a tricky case and he might well be late again.

  And that magic feeling only grew on a bright, crisp Saturday morning. They walked through the streets, headed for the Kunstmuseum, feeling autumn arriving in Basel. They stopped for coffee and apple donuts, two investigators on the case, sharing information, discussing strategy. Coming through the museum courtyard, Rudi Bucholtz felt monumental, there forever like the Burghers of Calais. Rudi’s eyes were definitely at the service of Inspector Aliette Nouvelle.

  VigiTec security agent Della Kypreosus — Greek or Macedonian, it sounded like — was there to greet them at nine o’clock sharp. Minimal German, a touch of English, no French at all, it seemed, but a large, proud smile as she led them down to the second basement.

  The monitoring suite was dimly spectral under the flat glow of three dozen screens and various tiny lights on the face of the controls. Inspector Nouvelle gave basic directions: a pale man. Pale and very slight. Alone or with Martin Bettelman. If there was footage of Agent Josephina Perella, this would be of interest too. Della assured her, ‘Me, I know.’ Rudy took his place beside Della. He was not worried when Aliette leaned close, whispered, ‘Counting on you, Agent Bucholtz. I’ll be back,’ gently patted him on the head and left the room. He thought she was going to the bathroom. It was over an hour later when it occurred she’d left him with a job.

  Fine. He settled in. But…

  But Rudi was trained to study paintings. Watching other people do it on a video screen was another thing entirely. This search through endless views of people passing through rooms, standing, gazing, then wandering away was excruciatingly tedious. The occasional appearance of Martin Bettelman, arms folded, drifting into a scene, then out again, was becoming a high point.

  VigiTec agent Della Kypreosus sat still and businesslike, eyes poring over every frame.

  At first Rudi felt an instinctive sense of competition with the immigrant worker. It did not last. The more Della focused, the more his discomfort increased. Agitated, he got up, stretched and paced, sat for a few more minutes, then went to pee. Then found his way up to the main floor.

  Where was Inspector Nouvelle? Had she gone for a tour? Rudi watched as museum goers entered, got their bearings, headed off toward the rooms. He fought the urge to leave, to walk out into the sunny Saturday… he went right up to the door and looked out at the Burghers of Calais. They appeared so free out there in the courtyard. But he returned to his chair beside Della.

  The inspector said she needed his eyes. Rudi had watched her eyes as she gazed at him the night before, half-smiling, half-wondering, so serious: they were a crystalline silver-blue. Rudi needed another night with this woman. To consummate it. To move it forward. It felt like destiny to Rudi…

  It occurred to him to ask Della, ‘Is she here — in the building?’

  Della sighed, hit some buttons. A quick scan in real time did not locate the French cop. She returned to their search. ‘We find this man for your boss.’

  ‘She’s not my boss.’

  Della laughed quietly in an unknowable-foreigner sort of way. She left to pee, leaving Rudi to stare at the back of a man’s head, a man in the Early Modern room who was in turn considering a painting of a young boy kneeling, prayerful by a single tree, rendered naïve and stark beside a naively rendered river. It was a Swiss painting, Rudi knew it well. Who? His brain was growing foggy and the artist’s name eluded him. And was this screen image real time? Or sometime days or weeks ago? ‘You eat,’ said Della, returning with a cookie tin and a thermos. The coffee was from somewhere east of Switzerland, the pastry was too sweet. But his boredom stoked his hunger and he quickly demolished five. ‘I make myself,’ Della said. An hour later the tin was empty. Rudi felt himself nodding off, lost in dull, sugar-induced catatonia.

  ‘Sad Martin,’ said a voice.

  Rudi shook himself awake. Della pointed to Martin Bettelman standing unobtrusively in a corner observing visitors. It couldn’t be real time — Martin Bettelman was dead. What about the pale-skinned man? Rudi allowed himself to fade again, till, ‘Sad Martin.’ Della added a musical intonation, a cue, a wake-up call. Rudi snapped to, watched dutifully, quietly ashamed of abusing the inspector’s trust. Until his requested eyes dropped shut again.

  ‘Wottel,’ Della announced. Agent Bucholtz was jolted back to awareness by a segment of video footage showing people moving quicker, some running. He watched Martin Bettelman running, then watched Bettelman explaining something to Agent Perella and Dieter Taub. In this dim room, in this twilight state of awareness, it was very real. But Agent Perella was also dead. He gave
his head a brisk shake. Wake up! In her special way, Della explained that this had been the day a small Watteau had suddenly not been on the wall.

  Did Watteau have anything to do with anything? Rudi made a note. ‘Let’s see the lead-up to that.’ Della pushed some buttons. They watched the general in-and-out flow at the front entrance in the days before the theft. Martin Bettelman was nowhere in that footage. Historically it was all in reverse and Rudi was lulled again. On Rudi’s command, Della brought them back to the actual day. ‘Not this day, frau! …the day of the theft!’ Rudi wanted to scream at someone.

  Della quickly relocated Dieter Taub and Agent Perella, Bettelman and several other flummoxed Kunst employees of various rank, silently conferring. Then Taub and Perella were alone together in front of the empty space on the wall. Rudi mused bleakly, ‘They look like the butcher and his wife.’ The notion was the result of too much television, an unfiltered tendency to generic typecasting after half a day in a subterranean video jail. Flat images and utter boredom left you dangerously open to the vagaries of dreams. But it was apt: Taub and Perella, both large-sized, middle-aged: Herr and Frau Butcher, looking well scrubbed for a day off from the shop to get some culture, then perhaps a sausage and some beer.

  ‘I don’t think this man like women,’ Della mused in response to Rudi’s musing.

  ‘Why would you think that, Della?’

  ‘I feel.’

  Rudi shrugged. Maybe Dieter Taub was gay. So what? Maybe Agent Perella had been too.

  They plowed on, at jerky speeds, sometimes in real-time reverse, on and on through a silent sea of desultory movement, formless, an ongoing logic-free portrayal of humanity that belied all noble adjectives, too much like watching cows at pasture, or those experiments observing dogs that have been allowed to wander free and always wander nowhere special: Arf!…until Della, inured to day-long onslaughts of brain-numbing black and white wide angles pushed a button that stopped the flow. ‘This man is very white.’

  Rudi woke up, leaned toward the screen. ‘Have we seen him before?’

  ‘I have seen. He is very white.’

  ‘With Martin Bettelman?’

  ‘No. With paintings. In rooms. Never with no one, I think.’

  ‘Fuck!’ They had to start all over again. They had to isolate this man.

  Everyone is white in grainy black and white. Wide angle, it is impossible to define the look in a person’s eyes. But Della was trained for this and they began to find him. An adolescent, or slightly older? It was difficult to say. Invariably dressed in nondescript Saturday clothes, jeans, trainers, an oversized hoodie obscuring a face already obscured by loose locks of darkish hair. He would sit on the armless banquette in the middle of the room and gaze. He would stand and come close, intimately close, hands seemingly poised as if to grab… Or was it to embrace? But they never saw him touch a painting. Not once. This young man with the veiled, pale white face.

  Della managed to freeze a side-angle close-up of his face as he was coming through the front door. The lips were his defining trait. Full, some would say feminine, in their set pout and shapely aspect. Della studied the image, then looked sidelong at Rudi. ‘He like you.’ It bothered FedPol Agent Bucholtz to hear it. Last night he’d happily indulged a French cop’s fleeting fantasy that he could be that man. Or boy? Checking date, time code, Della found a extra-wide perspective of the entrance area. This view showed Martin Bettelman watching this same visitor from his place by the door to the Romantics. They knew this with a simple switching of views. Della’s time code confirmed the same moment. Then, moving forward: That same day, inside the otherwise empty Romantics room the pale visitor stood and gazed, rapt. ‘Switch, please.’

  Della expertly obeyed. Rudi watched Martin Bettelman at his designated post, watching the pale visitor. Bettelman appeared sleepy (like himself), dreamy. He seemed to be swaying like a plant in the wind. Of course there was no wind — just a dozy contemplation creating movement, ever so slightly, languorous, the outer layer of an inner pulse. Agent Rudi Bucholtz did not understand what he was seeing till Della muttered, ‘Awful, Martin!’ She touched a toggle switch, the shot zoomed in and down to Bettelman’s crotch. His partially opened fly, his hand inside. It was awful. Disgusting. In a public place! And Martin Bettelman was supposed to be working.

  18

  Trapped in This Life

  Crossing the Wettstein Bridge, heading back to the Kunstmuseum, there was no pleasure in the charm of the four o’clock sun against the Basel rooftops, the strolling citizens, the busy river flowing past below. Aliette had spent the day traipsing from one private gallery to the next seeking traces of a fraudulent nexus tying art restorer Justin Aebischer to security guard Martin Bettelman to FedPol Agent Josephina Perella. Futile! It seemed Herr Dieter Taub had told it right: She had been politely stonewalled at every stop. At her last call, Herr Rutger Mettler had politely advised her that if the police persisted in this unseemly intrusion he would proceed to have his entire inventory moved to a secure bank vault at Bern. His security firm could have the job done by Sunday noon. (That would be Herr Taub.) The mention of an international mandate elicited the politest silence. Recalling the sorry sight of Franck Woerli’s confused and defeated eyes, Aliette could only think, Poor fool. Putting Dieter Taub’s negative prediction beside Hans Grinnell’s damning evidence, it was almost sure Perella had deliberately sent her naïve colleague into a void of bland Swiss discretion and impenetrable business code. Then gotten herself killed. Little wonder the place was as much a haven and transfer point for shadowy art as it was for dirty cash. Little wonder some police officers just gave up. Little wonder Inspector Nouvelle was in a foul mood when she stepped back into the dim security suite in the bowels of the museum.

  So was FedPol Agent Bucholtz. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Working! On my feet since this morning, wasting my precious time with a bunch of smiling connard Swiss… Do you know how many Flemish shoemakers of the late Romantic period there are out there?’ This was rhetorical. ‘Thousands upon thousands!’

  His smile was snide. ‘I did know that, yes.’ His tone said, You deserve it, bitch.

  VigiTec Agent Della Kypreosus was busily logging reference numbers. She looked up from her board and into the middle of an escalating French-Swiss confrontation. ‘We find him.’

  Which defused the situation, at least momentarily. Aliette took a seat, pointedly ignoring the surly Rudi while Della presented a series of black and white scenes featuring the same slight, stoop-shouldered youth whose bony, pale features were perpetually obscured by an oversized training hood as he stood motionless…for long periods it turned out, in front of works of art. The dates on the timecode went back more than a year. In the last few months, the lanky figure of Martin Bettelman in uniform became a regular sidebar to the non-action in the centre of the screen. Aliette cringed when they arrived at the horrid climax, so to speak. But it certainly could be the boy on the rock at her crime scene, and Martin Bettelman had been dangerously smitten. The link, though circumstantial, was now definitely there.

  But the third side of the triangle? ‘Is Josephina Perella anywhere in this?’

  It was Della, efficient and bright, who reported instantly. ‘No.’

  Standing, she extended a hand to Della, ‘Excellent work, madame. Merci.’

  That bothered Rudi. He picked up the fight exactly where they’d left it, whining, ‘It’s not fair to leave me sitting there without so much as a — ’

  ‘I left you with a job to do, Agent Bucholtz.’

  Rudi blinked, blushed deeply enough to be seen even in the half-light of that room, and, clearly angry at being embarrassed in front of a mere security guard who wasn’t even Swiss, blustered, ‘He loves Art Nouveau naïf. And ultra-metaphysical Romantic. OK?’

  ‘Bon. I trust you’ve made a detailed list.’ Shrugging away another muttered stream of Teutonic cursing, she picked up her bag and headed for the door.

  Relations were
distinctly cool as they made their way back to the FedPol offices on Freie.

  In the lift, he faced her. ‘Why exactly are we here?’ Same surly whine.

  Same cool French response. ‘As I mentioned yesterday, and as you might have noted, Rudi, our forensics indicate the possibility of a female shooter.’ That was a lie, both today and yesterday; it was strictly a feeling on her part. But, ‘Video presence or not, I need to pursue this further.’ Aliette led him through the empty office to Agent Perella’s desk and, exhausted, sat heavily down in her chair. ‘I need her key chain. If I remember, it’s in the top drawer.’

  He blanched, caught between petulance and rules. ‘I’m not authorized. I need to call Inspector Woerli. I — ’

  ‘Are you working with me or not, Rudi?’ Swivelling slowly in Josephina’s chair, knees opening and closing, methodically messaging her thighs, qualmless, only trying to keep the Swiss police moving forward. Adding, somewhat shamelessly, ‘All I really want is a nice warm bath. But we have to do this first. We have to.’

  The we and the warm bath plus white French thighs seemed to assure him. Rudi opened the drawer, produced the keys. Aliette smoothed her skirt and got to her feet with a groan.